Rob Mimpriss

A welaist ti ŵr diesgeulus yn ei orchwyl?

You have reached the website of Rob Mimpriss, the short-story writer. Read reviews and samples of my books, contact me to organise an event, or learn how my writing has been shaped by the intellectual heritage of Wales.

When your predecessor, Mr David Cameron, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and before calling his referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union membership, he wrote to Mr Jean Claud-Juncker as President of the European Commission to express his nations’ concerns at the terms of that membership, especially regarding freedom of movement, and regarding the principle of ever-closer union on which the European Union is built. He received a detailed, courteous and reassuring reply.

When Mr Cameron’s government published its draft Wales Powers Bill, criticised by constitutional experts as incoherent, as dismissive of Welsh politics, and even as vindictive in its attitude to Welsh national identity, the First Minister of Wales, Mr Carwyn Jones, wrote to the then Welsh Secretary, Mr Stephen Crabb, to express his nation’s concern that the bill gave English MPs an untrammelled right to interfere in Welsh democracy and to overturn Welsh law. His letter was dismissed by Mr Crabb as the rhetoric of a dangerous nationalist.

The European Union has been consistent and clear since before the referendum was called that the United Kingdom must accept all the Four Freedoms on which the European Union is built, in return for all the advantages of European membership for the state, and citizenship for its individuals, or leave the union at the risk of economic disaster to seek its prosperity elsewhere. During the last years of Mr John Major’s government, when appetite was growing for devolution in Wales and Scotland as a side-effect of his government’s concessions in pursuit of peace in Ireland, a rather self-satisfied English friend told me that Wales was either a subject of the United Kingdom as a number of county councils governed by English law, or a nation state with neither currency nor credit rating nor trade agreements nor diplomatic links, nor any other advantage to show for its eight hundred years as a subject of England, and that his party, the Conservative and Unionist Party, would never allow Wales any form of national identity within the United Kingdom.

I await your rational explanation as to the way in which the European Union is treating you disrespectfully.